You can Google anything, get a result, so I typed in Karnani Estates: bright as a fish it surfaced: touched its blue pulse, opening to a sepia tinted record of WW2 Calcutta: scrolled down with the speed of a mine-shaft lift to the photo: unmistakable, the five-story edifice; after all these years, my eye nimble as a monkey, up and down its stuccoed walls, resting on a fretted balcony front, on to the edge of the flat roof, where as a boy I had watched clouds.
The photo pre-dated my stay, when the Yanks were there, who left, as Yanks do, the flats let out; number eksowatara, 'thene thala,' the liftman closed the lift cage, pulled the lever: in the photo, I struggled for an inward glimpse of that corridor entry to our home; how perennial the glide over its checkered stone floor; how inexorably this day a world away has come.
Thanks for your compliments. As a writer of poetry in the English language, the effects I achieve are of the 'objective correlative', where the words themselves import the experience and enhance meaning. Such is the effect you notice in the line quoted, which is the end line of a stanza in which the liftman pulls a lever:
the liftman closed the lift cage, pulled the lever: in the photo, I struggled for an inward glimpse of that corridor entry to our home; how perennial the glide over its checkered stone floor; how inexorably this day a world away has come.
the lift starts to rise, and the bump when it stops is experienced in that last word of the last line: but it is also the bump bringing me to where I am now. These sort of effects are very difficult to convey in translation, though the gist of the poem can be conveyed but without the objective correlative effect.
Karnani Estates is situated off Lower Circular Road; Karnani Mansions is in the Park Street area.
rdashby
11/21/2011
I looked through a number of your poems -- a large number of them in fact. Though embarrassing, I must tell you the truth. They are difficult for someone like me. But I kept on trying till I landed the present one. I live in Kolkata (then Calcutta) and I am familiar with the Karnani Estate (or is it Mansion?). It still exists and I felt almost everything you had to say, especially
" .....................................................how inexorably this day a world away has come."
The lines I liked most were
"... my eye nimble as a monkey, up and down its stuccoed walls, resting on a fretted balcony front, on to the edge of the flat roof, where as a boy I had watched clouds."
Wonderfully nostalgic, painfully pleasing they appeared to me.
I will try and read more of your work to see if I can delve deeper.
